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May 01, 2019

Tolerance Leads To Acceptance

As we started thinking about moving, I was reminded that each of us is an interesting mixture of what we were born with, who raised us, where we have lived and the people whose lives have intersected our paths. How we have reacted to all those situations ends up defining us and our world view. Some of my best friends are living just miles from where they grew up. My wife, Glenda, and I have lived a far different life. We have called nine places home. The years have taken us from North Carolina to Nova Scotia and back. Our minds have been opened more than we could have ever hoped. We have had opportunities to grow that we would have missed if we had stayed rooted to one spot. We have lived in places where we were the different ones. We remain indebted to all those who have accepted us and made us welcome.

Here in our seventh decade, we are getting ready to put our house on the market and move once again. While high school in Tennessee and college in Massachusetts are not on my list of official homes, they were significant moves for me. The surprise that I was going off to military school for high school was my first taste of moving. It was not one that I welcomed but by second semester I learned that when you move you either make the best of it or end up being miserable. Glenda’s first move after we were married was from a modern apartment in Greensboro, North Carolina to a two-hundred-year-old farm house on the shore of the Bay of Fundy. That led to my first experience with a real moving van. I had to use our John Deere tractor to pull the stuck moving van out of the driveway of the wrong house on our dirt road in Nova Scotia. Another move was during a blizzard when Glenda bravely followed in her car with the youngest of our three children as we left the farm for a new life in the city.

Yet here we are, ready to go again. In spite of once again having to sort our accumulated possessions, we both are looking forward to our next adventure, the people we will meet and the places we will explore. We have learned a lot about people by having neighbors whose life experiences have been very different from ours. It is possible to disagree about lots of things and still be neighborly. Age is not a barrier in friendships or work. The wealth of hard-earned information learned from people decades older than me is hard to measure. Watching the children of our friends and neighbors grow up, while not as good as being with our real grandchildren, is still a part of life to treasure. When you have no family nearby, you learn to create an ad hoc one.

Moving several times means you will encounter people whose interactions are just attempts to bring tangible benefits to themselves or their family. They begrudge any good fortune for people unlike themselves. If you cannot do anything for them, they will have no use for you. They show little or no empathy for people who have struggled in life. People like this are huge obstacles to building a society that works for everyone. Meeting these people does not mean you have to let them define your life.

People who have so tightly wrapped their arms around their own success typically move from one place where they were surrounded by people like themselves to another place just like the first. Enclaves of sameness can thwart tolerance just as much as people living in an isolated community where few outsiders ever make it. We have experienced that also. America has too many places where all the neighbors are more alike than not. Neighbors might care about their immediate neighbors but they struggle to care about others that they cannot imagine as neighbors.

That is the thing about moving and living in so many different places, it is easy to imagine someone who is very different being your neighbor.

There is no guarantee that the next place will make a great home, but it is a risk worth taking. We have never struck out on finding good people and we have been fortunate to have lived in the midst of extraordinary beauty many times. From watching ships dock from our bedroom window in Halifax, Nova Scotia to seeing the sun fall below the pines from my kayak here on the White Oak River, the scenic beauty of the places where we have lived has also enriched our lives.

Each place has brought personal growth. I built barns in Tay Creek, New Brunswick. There Glenda learned how to drive a tractor and rake hay. After our move to the city of Halifax, she mastered a gas-powered snowblower. By the time we got to Virginia by way of Maryland, she was managing with unimaginable grace and strength to raise our three children, care for my elderly mother and work while I was racking up air miles and eventually sitting in on a cyber security hearing in the Rayburn Office building. While I was immersed in corporate life, Glenda mastered the art of transforming a house into a home. She connected with others even if she had to become the editor for the Newcomers Newsletter. Our growth has not stopped. Near Emerald Isle’s beaches, I wrote my first book and learned how to boat. More than once I have ventured with our skiff out Bogue Inlet into the Atlantic Ocean. I am proud that I was able to do that before I got too old to try. Glenda learned to enjoy boating but never warmed to the idea of a small boat in a big ocean. She did fall in love with the salt marshes and the fish I caught for dinner but not the oyster roasts that I cherished.

Home makes you feel secure and being secure makes you reluctant to move. Certainly, I will greatly miss this most recent home on Raymond’s Gut and the friends we have made. We will take the memories with us. Our waterfront home has been a safe haven even in hurricanes like Irene and Florence. We will never forget the natural world of the salt marshes that have brought wonder into our lives daily. Recently, from our kitchen window we watched an Osprey high in a pine tree eat a trout that would have been a keeper for this human fisherman.

Late in March from the window in my office, which has been my best writing nook ever, I saw Frank 29X, a great egret tagged 700 miles away on Nottawasaga Island, Ontario. What other spot on earth has a great egret who has come to winter every year since 2012?

It is hard to leave all the big birds and river otters that often play around our dock. Then there are the red drum, flounder, and trout I have yet to catch. I doubt that I will ever again live within paddling distance of catching our lunch. Still we remain excited about the people, the surprises and the lessons that we will discover at our next home. There is still much to learn and moving will help us begin again.